No More War

Image from front cover of ‘Three Births in September’ by Colonel Moshe Givati;
published by Ministry of Defence, 1990; painting by Ziv Bashan

‘Valley of Tears,’ the dramatic series currently being shown on Israeli TV about events in the Golan Heights at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war, has had me and many others spellbound each week.

Although several of my friends and acquaintances have told me that they are unable to watch it as it brings back too many painful memories, I find myself compelled to watch. I quite understand their attitude, and am almost surprised at my own ability to persist through every graphic scene. I admit that I find it difficult to sleep afterwards, but some obsessive preoccupation with the events of that traumatic time brings me back to the screen every week.

I was living in Israel at the time, and in fact had just given birth to my third child when the war broke out. My stay in the maternity ward was cut short that Shabbat which also happened to be Yom Kippur when the silence of the day of rest, prayer and contemplation was shattered by the sound of the sirens echoing through the Jerusalem air. I managed to listen to the news on my portable radio, so knew that a war had broken out. All the mothers were told to leave the hospital with their babies, and that is what most of us managed to do somehow, as Israel’s population was being mobilized to deal with the crisis.

The scene in our home was one of confusion, with our two young children eager to meet their new sibling, my husband and I trying to find the best place to put the baby’s cot and keep us all away from any falling bombs (he and I had experienced the Six Day war in Jerusalem and expected to hear planes, bombs and artillery again) and our need to try to gain what information we could from our recently-acquired television set.

Our experience of the Six Day War led us (and most other people, too, I suppose) to expect the war to be over soon, but as we all know now, that was far from the case. As the days dragged on and grim news came from the various fronts (and we at the rear were not given all the facts until much later), the idea that matters were not going well eventually sank in.

With two young children and a newborn baby to look after our attention was soon focused on getting through the day and the night. Our apartment on the top storey left us feeling exposed, but there was no shelter nearby other than our downstairs neighbour, who was away. Although the absence of bombing and artillery surprised us at first, we knew that there was heavy fighting in both the north and the south of Israel, and hoped that the border with Jordan would remain quiet.

Now, when I watch the dramatic and graphic reenactment of what went on at the time in the Golan Heights, I realise that I was completely unaware of the tragedy that was unfolding not so very far from my home. The threat to Israel’s continued existence was more real than we could imagine, and it is only because of the courage and sacrifice of our soldiers that we are still here today.

The price that was paid in life and limb was heavy beyond all imagination, and there are those among us who still today bear the mental and physical scars of that war. Since then I have translated memoirs written by senior officers who fought in the war, and they left a deep impression on me.

I have seen various criticism of the way the TV series depicts what happened then, but in my view, if it serves any purpose it is to drive home the message that no matter how bad things are here, how rotten our politicians, how decadent our society, how irrelevant our daily concerns, anything, and I mean anything, yes anything is better than war.

‘The Dark Circle’ by Linda Grant

I ordered this book (from Bibliophile Books) because it was described as being set in 1950s England – a time when I was beginning to be aware of the world around me, growing up into teenagerhood and going through my school years. Those were my formative years, in fact.

The main theme of the book is the battle with TB (tuberculosis) of the characters depicted in it, just as the miracle medicine of antibiotics, known then as Streptomycin, is beginning to appear on the world stage, bringing with it the promise of salvation from diseases formerly considered incurable, even fatal. While the wider context of the book is 1950s Britain, with its entrenched class differences, prejudices and post-war restrictions, the immediate environment in which the narrative develops is a custom-built sanatorium intended to cure its inmates, or residents.

The two principal characters are Lenny and Miriam Lynskey, teenage twins from the East End of London and, yes, Jewish. There are references to the various kinds of food their mother brings them on visiting days (kichelach, chopped liver, potato latkes), and the occasional Yiddish expression is thrown in for good measure. Because of the recently established National Health system, which had made the benefits of medical care universally available in England, they find themselves in a milieu which consists mainly of genteel, middle- or upper-class individuals, such as former officers, university graduates, or business people, but all with TB. The author also reveals the attitudes held by the other inmates towards the new arrivals, and Jews in general, especially refugees, with references to widely-held anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic views.

As I was reading I could hear echoes of Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ in the accounts of the monotony, boredom and gloom of life in a sanatorium, despite the good-intentions the various members of staff. The treatments are sometimes inexpressibly harsh, involving endless bed-rest on outside verandas, in all weathers, on the assumption that freezing cold air is somehow good for the lungs. Meanwhile, friendships are established, sexual adventures are experienced and a panoply of characters from vastly different backgrounds are presented. Lenny and Miriam are introduced to English literature by one of the inmates, and as the book progresses, describing the year that they spend in the sanatorium, we follow the development of their personalities.

The conclusion of the book brings us into contemporary England and we see how the lives of the various inmates developed over time, revealing the forces that have made England into the country and society it is today.

The book is written in an interesting and insightful way, and provides the all-encompassing experience one seeks in a book, namely, entering into a world of imagination that is not our own but with which the reader can identify.

A Visit to the Hula Lake Area

The second Coronavirus lockdown has just ended, and the third one can already be seen in the offing. So anyone with a yen for a change of atmosphere and landscape had better utilise the opportunity to take to the open road, and get out of the house.

So hubby and I decided to make for the north of Israel, to the Hula wetlands or lake area, since at this time of the year it serves as a stop-over and resting place for many migratory birds making their way from Europe to Africa for the winter. Israel’s location, between the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the arid Arabian desert to the eest, has made it the preferred flight path for millions of birds migrating from their summer sojourn in Europe to Africa’s warm winter.

Our friends in central France have recently reported sighting and hearing the flocks of cranes (grue) overhead on their way to warmer climes. For those agricultural communities this presages the change of the seasons, and plays an important role in their life. Here in Israel the arrival of the birds has been less welcome in the past, as they tend to eat the fish in kibbutz fishponds and the grain in fields. However, the JNF, which manages, the area of the Hula, has seen to it that the lakes in the area are stocked with fish and grain is put out for the birds, thus enticing them to prefer that venue.

The history of the Hula region is interesting in itself. Set in the low-lying area between the Golan Height and Upper Galilee, for thousands of years it has been a site where human habitation has been sparse. The marshy terrain served as a fertile breeding ground for insects, so that malaria and other diseases were prevalent, causing high death rates among human inhabitants of the region. The presence of water-fowl and other animal denizens made it an ideal hunting-ground. The local inhabitants cultivated rice and wove the indigenous reeds into matting which was used for constructing and furnishing their accommodation. Remains of human habitation dating back thousands of years have been found in the area.

Jewish settlement in the area began in 1883 with the First Aliya, when Yesud HaMa’ala was established on the western shore of the lake. In 1948 there were 35 villages in the Hula Valley, 12 of them Jewish and 23 Arab.

In the early 1950s Israel’s government invested considerable efforts in draining the marshes in order to use the reclaimed land for agriculture. This turned out to be less than successful, as water containing chemical fertilizers served to pollute nearby Lake Tiberias while the reclaimed soil became dry and infertile. Eventually, environmental concerns prevailed, the wetlands were restored to their original state, and the JNF established the Hula National Lake Park as an area where visitors can come and enjoy the bird life.

And so a couple of days ago, ensconced in a golf buggy, hubby and I drove along the eight-kilometer-long path, passing lakes and open areas where birds of all sizes and kinds could be seen and heard. We particularly enjoyed the sight of pelicans fishing in pairs in one of the lakes, and the cranes flying from one feeding-ground to another, or landing near us on ground that was dry. Cranes seem to be much smaller on the ground than when they are flying in formation overhead.

The weather was perfect, the sight of the land, the mountains and the beauty of the region were invigorating and it was good to get out into the open, breathe the fresh air, and feel that we were communing with nature once more.

The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers

(Translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo) This is not an easy, light-hearted read. Far from it. It describes in harrowing detail the experiences of George Heisler, who is one of seven men who have escaped from a prison camp somewhere in rural Germany. The year is 1935, and anyone suspected of opposing the Nazi regime is liable to be summoned by the Gestapo, arrested and sent to a prison camp.

Although the camps were not yet sites of mass murder on an industrial scale, the use of indiscriminate brutality was widespread. The seventh cross of the title was part of an arrangement in the camp whereby prisoners were punished by being nailed to crosses attached to trees and subjected to various sadistic practices by the men who ran the camp, leading ecventually to their death.

George’s escape route, a veritable Via Dolorosa lasting a week, takes him over the barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp, across the difficult terrain of the local countryside and along paths that intersect with villages and towns which contain people who may either help or betray him. George is a native of the region, so there are some people who know him and would help him if he came to them, while others who know him are too much in fear of the consequences to be prepared to extend a helping hand. His main problem is that he doesn’t know into which category any individual might fall. That is his constant dilemma.

Interspersed with graphic descriptions of the privations experienced by George are accounts of the course taken by the other escapees, all of whom are either captured or killed. The reader’s feelings are not spared when it comes to descriptions of the punishment meted out to those who are returned to the camp. The lives and emotions of the various individuals in the surrounding countryside are also described at length, and it is at times confusing as we try to disentangle exactly who and what each character is and where they stand with regard to George. But the general atmosphere is one of fear and suspicion, and that is the main point.

Alongside descriptions of a wide range of characters, we are also treated to a detailed account of the surrounding countryside, the activities of the various farmers and villagers, and the climate, with the ever-present mist rising from the nearby river, enveloping everything and determining what is seen and what is hidden. The female characters are mostly docile farmer’s wives or daughters whose main occupation is cooking, baking and tending to their household chores. The inner lives of the men who run the camps and are members of the Gestapo, the S.S. and the S.A. are also revealed to the reader with all their warped logic and justification of the unjustifiable.

Eventually one friend, motivated by their joint past as opponents of the Fascist ideology, undertakes to help George, even letting him stay in his home overnight. He arranges for George to be helped to escape the country, and it is with this that the book ends.

What is most amazing is that this book was written before the Second World War and published in 1942, when the was was raging, but the full extent of the Holocaust and all its attendant horrors was not yet known. It is not so much prescient as providing an accurate picture of the way terror and physical violence came to dominate the thinking and behaviour of people who would otherwise have continued to live peaceful and inoffensive lives, showing how an entire society could accept a perverted ideology and become subservient to the rule of terror and fear.